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Smartphones and tablets with touchscreens have succeeded in no small part because of their simplicity. Things like memory management and multiple layered windows were removed from the equation and replaced with fullscreen applications that allowed for only minimal background activity. To varying degrees, multitasking via applications running in the background has come to iOS and Android, but even Windows is moving away from windowed programs toward a brave new fullscreen future.

At least, to a point. Windows 8 will retain its traditional desktop to enable more versatile computing when desired, and we hope to see more versatile multitasking to come to other tablets as well. Samsung's new Galaxy Note 10.1 wants to be one of those tablets, trying a couple of different multitasking methods that actually work quite well—or they would, if they could support any applications that weren't built in to the device.

The hardware: High-end inside, cheap and plasticky outside

Enlarge/ Across the top of the Note 10.1: the headphone jack, IR blaster, SD card slot, volume rocker, and power button.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ On the bottom of the tablet, you'll see its proprietary power and data connector. On the right side, you can also see the compartment where the pen is stored.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The Note 10.1's speakers don't get very loud and don't have much bass, but they are mounted on the front of the device, which makes them more difficult to block by accident while watching videos.

Andrew Cunningham

Let's start with the good: the Note 10.1, which measures 7.1" x 1.3" x 10.3" and weighs 1.3 pounds, is powered by a 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos 4412 CPU and an ARM Mali-400 MP4 GPU. As our benchmarks will show, this is a fast combination that compares favorably to other Android tablets and to Apple's iPad. 16GB and 32GB capacities are available now, with a 64GB version planned for release at an unspecified future date—for now, up to 32GB of additional storage can be added via the MicroSD card slot. A 5.0 megapixel rear camera with flash and a 1.9 megapixel front camera are also included; the latter is suitable for video chatting and not much else, and the former takes passable-but-noisy photos with muted colors.

Enlarge/ A picture of some of the junk on my desk taken with the iPhone 4S.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The same desk junk, taken with the Note 10.1's camera. Note in particular the extra noise and more muted reds.

Andrew Cunningham

Rounding out the hardware is dual-band WiFi (a 3G version is forthcoming) and Bluetooth 4.0; HDMI output and USB On-The-Go support are both possible if you purchase the required dongles. One odd but interesting inclusion is the presence of an IR blaster, which can be used to control your television and other boxes in your home entertainment center via the included Peel Smart Remote app—this feature has also been available in some past Galaxy Tab hardware. An equally interesting omission is its lack of an NFC chip, meaning that you won't be able to beam information easily between the Note 10.1 and your Galaxy S III or Galaxy Nexus.

Now that we've got the good stuff out of the way, let's talk about the physical construction of the tablet.

The body of the Note 10.1 is made entirely of plastic, so it weighs less than both the latest iPad and older tablets like the Motorola Xoom, making it a bit more pleasant to use in portrait mode. However, the plastic has a lot of flex to it, especially on the back, and it contributes to a cheap feeling that belies the Note 10.1's premium pricing. There are ways to do plastic well—I'd hold up the Nexus 7 and Nokia Lumia 900 as good examples—but the Note 10.1 doesn't stand up to either of those two. The Galaxy Note smartphone is similarly light and all-plastic, but its more rigid, texturized plastic back and lack of chintzy silver trim (which the Note 10.1 has) make it look and feel better in the hand.

Enlarge/ The back of the Note 10.1 is a flexible feeling plastic that makes it feel cheap. The tablet also comes in black.

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The screen is also a disappointment—it's bright and has good color and viewing angles, but a 1280x800 screen in a $500 tablet is a definite strike when other tablets in the same price range are offering 1920x1200 (in the case of ASUS' Transformer Pad Infinity) or 2048x1536 (Apple's newest iPad). It's a perfectly serviceable screen, but that's the nicest adjective it elicits.

Benchmarks and battery life

The extra CPU cores in the Nexus 7 and Note 10.1 give them better Geekbench scores than the iOS devices, though as the Sunspider scores show, additional processing power doesn't always translate directly into increased performance. In this case, the Note 10.1 is still faster than the Nexus 7 and both iPads.

In our GPU tests, our first with the recently released GLBenchmark 2.5, the Note 10.1 edges out the old iPad 2, but falls far short of the Retina iPad—Apple's tablets have always placed a heavy emphasis on GPU performance, so this should come as no surprise.

The Exynos 4 is manufactured on a 32nm process, so this power doesn't come at the cost of battery life. In our usage, which combined Netflix streaming, Web browsing, note-taking with the S Pen, and light gaming—all with WiFi enabled and the screen at 50 percent brightness—the 7,000mAh battery lasted for about eight-and-a-half hours, comparable to other tablets of this size. Your mileage will obviously vary depending on the specific tasks you're performing.

The pen

The thing that Samsung hopes will differentiate the Note 10.1 from other Android tablets is the S Pen, a small, light stylus that slides into the tablet's case while not in use. As we discussed in our original hands-on, the stylus interacts with an additional layer underneath the LCD—it won't work with any old tablet, but the additional hardware makes it a bit more accurate than plain capacitive styli (it also allows the tablet to detect the tip of the pen even if it isn't touching the screen). The tablet's Wacom digitizer is pressure-sensitive, though Samsung's advertised 1,000 sensitivity levels seems a bit optimistic based on our usage.

Using S Note's handwriting recognition features made this happen a lot.

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The Note 10.1 features a few apps designed to use the S Pen—the most prominent is Samsung's own S Note, which allows for both the scrawling of notes and the drawing of pictures. Its many buttons and settings are a bit oblique at first, but a set of instructions and some poking around will soon familiarize you with its features. S Note also includes handwriting recognition for text and equations, which works fairly well, but I was able to get the application to crash pretty consistently if I threw too much at it too quickly—the worse the handwriting, the quicker the app was to crash.

The other apps designed to showcase the S Pen include Adobe Photoshop Touch, which is made much more accurate by the tablet's ability to detect the tip of the pen from a couple of inches away; Crayon Physics Deluxe, a fun if nearly four-year-old game; and Kno.com, an e-textbook app that lets you highlight passages of books and write notes in the margins. Other apps designed with the S Pen in mind are available in Samsung's app store, though the majority of applications from the Google Play store are going to be designed with fingers in mind.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites